Hill of Our Home
by Bone Dry
Summary: Pastfic. When the path of obsession leads her to the precipice of oblivion, Kate Beckett must decide both who she is and who she will become.
1. Chapter One

A/N: I'm not a cop. While Google gave me the gist of how actual police training works, I've decided to take massive creative license and do what I want without much respect for the real world, so I apologize in advance to anyone who knows better.  
>Further, this is a background fic in storytelling form, fluff and Castle-free. The focus is how Beckett got to where she is, not who she is now. Set very shortly after TLaDiLA.<p>

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><p>Hill of Our Home<br>Chapter One

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><p><em>Today ate us up<br>__And never chewed  
><em>_Though we still roll along this hill  
><em>_The change that we don't see  
><em>_Is happenin' to me  
><em>_Though you are watching..._

"Hill of Our Home," Psapp (2006)

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><p>The hum of nearby voices cut softly over the throng of distant traffic, and only one of six pairs of eyes regarded her as she approached. They stood just outside the light of a streetlamp, in the shadow of some restaurant, and they were smoking as they talked about nothing she could hear. A cigarette flared yellow as she passed, and the smoke followed her down the street as she adjusted in her coat.<p>

Yesterday's rain was still heavy in the city. She could smell wet garbage and tar, and it was heady over the dryness of exhaust, mingling sourly with curry from the place across the street. Forecasters were predicting more rain, but for the moment it was just cool, the moisture in the air having yet to graduate back to the clouds.

She skirted a pothole as she stepped onto crosswalk, eying the water it had trapped only briefly before making her way past it. Her thoughts were not here as much as her senses were, and her gaze was mostly directed straight ahead, at a building that had yet to come into view. She'd been walking that way awhile, but she didn't know how long. She hadn't really put any thought into it when she'd first set off.

And that had been awhile ago.

She exhaled as bass throbbed through her and the sidewalk.

She hadn't been gone long, but leaving had created a literal and figurative sort of distance between her and reality, and that had disappeared once the plane's wheels had hit tarmac. Now she was back on an all-too-familiar street, on a path to an all-too-familiar, if long forsaken, haunt, and reality and memories were pressing upon her with an intensity made tolerable only by the distraction of her aching heels.

She hadn't dressed for this walk, but then she hadn't expected to make it.

She barely glanced around herself as she stepped onto the next crosswalk, eyes fixed on a small, green, neon sign fixed to the brick of the building directly across the street. Flannigan's Pub. It was a little hole in the wall, as it was so tritely, albeit aptly, described. While the name might imply four-leafed clovers, green beer, and sports on a TV suspended above the bar, Flannigan's was a cop bar. Whether it had always been a cop bar or not was up for speculation, but, as far she knew, no one particularly cared about its history.

She stopped for a moment at the door before giving the wood a heavy push with her shoulder. The smell of booze and old, old tobacco — the kind that had soaked into the very fibers of the building — rolled over her in a wave of too-warm air for the night outside. She let the heat envelope her as the door closed behind her, and she went to the far end of the bar, at the short side of the L.

The last time she'd been here, she'd still been in uniform.

Despite the hour, the only other patron at the bar seemed to be a patrol cop with his hat off and collar loosened. He was staring into his glass with an air of vacancy, like he'd come to escape and ended up just checking out.

Her attention was redirected away from him as a figure emerged from a doorway behind the bar.

She recognized him. He was older now – hair thinner, jawline less firm – but the eyes were the same. He regarded her with that half-twitch kind of smile that she never could figure out how to read. He was Flannigan, though she felt certain that wasn't his real name. As far as she knew, which wasn't too far, he'd been here forever.

"Beckett, right?" he said. His voice was low and throaty. He sounded a lot older than he was.

"Yeah," she paused, fingers halfway through her interior coat pocket. "Surprised you remembered me."

He shrugged and gestured up at the wall. "Got your picture."

She followed his line of sight and was met with a blurry frame of her and a bunch of other guys, back when they'd all been in uniform. They'd been sitting where the patrol cop was now, and her gaze rested briefly on one face in particular before she looked down and away, pulling her wallet out.

"What's your poison?" Flannigan asked as she thumbed through cards.

"Wild Turkey," she said, slipping one out and handing it to him, "on the rocks. And start a tab for me."

He nodded and took the card from her.

That blurry shot burned into her mind, and the air seemed warmer as she sat there. She could remember the night it was taken through bits and pieces of old memories. Whether the construction was accurate or not, she believed the images as if she'd only just experienced them.

Flannigan set the glass in front of her and her card beside it, and she downed the shot, exhaling sharply as fire roared down her throat.

"Where's your partner?"

She tensed as she set the glass down, glancing up at him.

"I don't remember ever seein' you here without him," the bartender said as he refilled it. "'Course, that was years ago now." He slipped the bottle back behind the bar. "You two still talk?"

She took her card back slowly, fingering the hard, plastic rim. "He's dead," she heard herself saying, and she touched the raised numbers before slipping the card back into her wallet, swallowing.

Avoiding his eyes, she tucked her wallet away, and she stared at the ice in the glass, and at the dark amber of the liquor.

"He was murdered," she said. "And I never forgave him."

The glass felt cold in her fingers as she picked it up and raised it to her lips.

* * *

><p>Someone had vomited here recently.<p>

She exhaled, staring pointedly ahead, at the steel doors.

Either that or this was the smell of many years of vomiting which had, through time, managed to soak into the linoleum.

A cop to her right shifted and cleared his throat, then took a sip from his cardboard cup. Like almost all the cops she'd seen on her way to the elevator, his coffee had been obtained outside the precinct.

She looked down at her own mug, which was partially hidden between her arm and her side.

After all the police procedurals she'd read, she wanted to find out for herself about squadroom coffee. It was a trivial fixation, and in reality she was more nervous about other things, but as she'd stood in her kitchen that morning, staring blankly at a bowl of cornflakes, and already on her third cup of coffee, she'd been overwhelmed with the desire to know. Maybe she was just jittery and needed to be occupied. She certainly felt that way.

The elevator pinged and creaked open. Beckett hesitated for a beat, then followed the cop out.

She was here a half hour early. After not really sleeping, this was the earliest she thought she could get away with. Now she had to kill time until her TO arrived for his shift.

Just beyond a short hallway of doors, the room opened up to a glass enclosed office space. Her gaze flicked from desk to desk before she glanced left, where a narrow hallway went around to somewhere else. She opted for the latter direction, and she felt butterflies take wing in her gut as she rounded the corner, passing another cop.

She'd made it here; she was one step closer.

Her fingers looped around her belt, and she touched her new service weapon, feeling an odd sort of thrill—like she could walk through fire but she'd be set aflame for it.

The hallway dumped her out into another intersection, with the choice of right into the maze of desks, or forward, into a small, enclosed room. She recognized counter top and tables. This was the breakroom.

She stepped forward, curling the hand that wasn't attached to her belt around her mug. It was ceramic, glazed forest green and gingerbread. She'd bought it for a quarter on Canal Street years ago. It didn't really seem to belong here, in a place that smelled like a combination of feet, stale perfume, fabric softener, and vomit, but it was a piece of normalcy, a piece of her.

She set the mug on the counter.

Before her was a standard steel percolator, and beside it various baskets full of synthetic sugars, cream containers, and stirry straws. She hefted the pot and, finding it mostly full, filled her mug halfway. Then she started dumping in sugar and cream.

Beckett had always liked her coffee sweet. Her dad, long known to pour whiskey into his mug as early at nine in the morning, liked to poke fun at her for that, but she'd stood by her preference. If she was going to be nursing it into the light hours of the morning, it might as well taste good, especially when it had gone cold.

She swirled the coffee around with a stick, and, once satisfied that it was white enough, she took a sip.

* * *

><p>"I didn't know what the hell I was doing back then," Beckett said, smiling softly to herself as she swirled the ice in her glass around and around. The cubes caught the light as they whirled. Over and over they caught the light. "Too many cop books, I guess." She cleared her throat, "Everything just seemed...surreal. Like, I dunno..." her voice trailed off, and she scooted the little wooden bowl of bar nuts toward her. "I wasn't really there."<p>

She didn't know if Flannigan was listening, and she found that she really didn't care if he was. Crushing a peanut shell between her fingers, she leaned back and picked at the remains. "Amazed Royce put up with me," she said, popping two peanuts into her mouth. "But then, I guess he was stuck with me."

Sighing, she leaned forward again and gestured at her glass. Light bounced off the liquor as Flannigan poured it, and the light made it look like honey, and made everything look beautiful. The light bounced off the cubes as she raised the glass again.

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><p>Beckett reached for the percolator for round two and a half of coffee. The stuff tasted awful, like earwax or the silty stuff at the bottom of a lake, but after twenty minutes of waiting around, it had an odd sort of appeal. She was starting to wonder if it was like alcohol: have enough, you forget what it tastes like.<p>

But that didn't seem to be the case here.

She dumped more sugar into what was starting to resemble liquid marble, then took a test sip. It still just tasted like sweetened lake sludge.

Exhaling, she dumped it down the drain. She was starting to feel sick from all the coffee she'd consumed this morning anyway, and it wasn't worth having anymore.

She washed her cup until it was cold, then she turned for the squadroom.

The desk sergeant had told her her TO's name was Michael Royce, and his desk was in the second row from the north wall, near the middle. As she stood in the doorway, staring blankly into the squadroom and its sea of desks, it occurred to her that this information meant relatively little to her. It then occurred to her that officers have nameplates.

Feeling like an idiot, she took a purposeful stride forward, glancing at the little etched markers as she went, all the while trying very hard to look like she wasn't. She felt like she had when she'd gotten her first job back in high school, which seemed ridiculous given the setting, and given that that was almost a decade ago.

Her gaze fell on the right nameplate, and she walked toward the desk, finally untangling her fingers from her belt.

Its occupant was absent, but his things weren't. Papers and files were stacked and scattered everywhere. A couple of post-its were stuck to the desk, some to papers. Lying half on top of the phone was a yellow legal pad scrawled with notes, and the cup holding pens, pencils, and letter opener had spilled its contents all over the left side of the desk. The nameplate she'd spotted was half covered by a second legal pad.

She glanced to the desk pressed against Royce's. It was empty, lacking all but a phone.

Her mouth went dry.

Did new cops get desks?

Gently, she touched the fake wood grain, savoring that idea. The table looked beat to hell, but she could feel an irrational sort of love for it bubble up in her chest.

A voice shattered it. "What the hell are you looking at?"

She whirled, coming eye-to-eye with a gruff-looking and much older cop. He was eying her in an unfriendly, territorial sort of way.

"Nothing," she said automatically.

He grunted and dropped into his chair, taking off his cop hat. Then he rubbed his eyes.

"You're Royce?" she asked.

"Yeah."

"I'm Kate Beckett." She offered a hand to him, the one that wasn't still clutching her mug. "I've been assigned to you."

He studied her and her palm before taking it. "I know," he said. The sole intention of his grip seemed to be reducing her bones to powder, and he kept eye contact with her as he crushed her fingers together.

Her molars clamped as she squeezed back, maintaining eye contact, and, for a tense moment, the pressure in the air around them skyrocketed.

He broke it. "Sixteen years on the force," he said, releasing her. "And now they give me a rookie for a partner."

She didn't know how to reply to that.

"Sit down, kid," he indicated the chair on the side of his desk, not the one opposite him. "We've got stuff to do."

* * *

><p>"Honestly," Beckett said, rolling the ice in her glass around again. It was mostly melted off now. "At first I thought Royce was just an asshole. He didn't seem to want me around. I used to think he just hated having a woman for a partner, especially one as green as I was, but then he told me, about his old partner." She set the glass down and stared into it, at the ice as it melted. In her periphery, she saw Flannigan shift and glance down at her.<p>

"Apparently they'd gone out on some routine disturbance call." She fingered the glass. "They'd separated to go check something out, and then there was a shot, or a couple shots. He wasn't even there..." her voice trailed off. "Lewis. His name was Lewis."

She cleared her throat, reaching for the bar nuts, "But he didn't tell me that for a long time. I think that's why he resented me." She crushed another peanut and rolled the shell around her palms. "Maybe he thought making him a TO was the department's way of telling him he needed to relearn how to be a partner, or maybe it's just that I was the replacement, I don't really know, but I was sure..." she fished the two nuts from her hand and chewed them, "I was sure he'd put in his sixteen weeks with me, then dump me off on somebody else." She deposited the shell pieces by her glass, eyes directed at a reflection in a faraway bottle.

"But," she swallowed, tasting the salt on her teeth, "he didn't."

She crushed and ate a few more, then a handful, and they were salty, but they were good. She piled them up on the counter beside her glass, and she stared at them.

"Just toss 'em on the floor," the bartender said his first words in awhile. "Everyone does."

She met his eyes briefly before setting her palm behind the pile of shells. "We were partners three years," she said, looking away. "Right up until I was made a detective."

Exhaling, she brushed them all off the counter.

* * *

><p>Right, that's all she wrote for now.<p>

I'm new to Castle after a rather long period with Bones. If there are any Boneheads reading and you get bored between updates, I've got fic for you in archives. If you're not a Bonehead and get bored between updates, well...I can't help you. But I'll try to keep updates rolling.

And, as is standard for these sorts of things, please go ahead and click the button below and give me your thoughts. I'd very much appreciate it.


	2. Chapter Two

There's a strong possibility that this chapter (like most of this fic) could be Jossed, and I can't say for sure if I'll fix it if it is. This note is mostly aimed at anyone reading this story after said Jossing has occurred.

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><p>Hill of Our Home<br>Chapter Two

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><p>The neon lights across the pavement looped through their colors continually, like an amusement park ride from far away. Red, blue, and white. The colors went round and round the letters in different patterns and different orders, but all conveyed the same messages: beer and yes, we're open! There was another sign, also neon, but bright gold. It said Corona, and the light for its little lime was out.<p>

Beckett took a long sip of coffee, still staring at the bar.

She could hear people talking through the glass, and the dusky notes of an electric guitar backed by bass. A TV was flashing through the open door, and she watched what looked like an ad for insurance between the silhouettes of the bar's patrons.

She was halfway through mid-shift, and Royce had gone to pick up their dinner.

She took another sip of coffee.

The day had been uneventful, as had the start of the night. Cruising through Midtown had only produced a couple kids tagging an apartment complex, and most of what dispatch had called for had been answered by other cops. She couldn't say she was necessarily unhappy about a quiet night, but neither could she say sitting aimlessly in the passenger side of the car all night was the best use of her time.

She let out a long breath, swirling her coffee around its styrofoam cup, and jumped slightly as the driver's side door opened.

"Hey," Royce greeted. Wasn't exactly warm and friendly, but it was a step up from the grunts she normally could expect from him.

"Hey," she echoed.

"Can you believe it?" he said, untying a plastic baggie and extracting several little white cartons, "Almost twenty-five bucks for beef and noodles."

"Did you get anything to drink?" she asked, ignoring that as he handed her a carton with some illegible scrawl on it.

"With how much coffee you've been putting away?"

She pursed her lips, tucking her mostly empty cup between her legs.

"No," he grinned, just slightly. "Not there, anyway. Went to the mini-mart across the street, picked up a Coke for me, water for you."

"Thanks," she popped open her container, but didn't see the noodles she'd ordered. "This is yours," she said, and they switched. He handed her her water, which she tucked in the car door.

"Twelve bucks for broccoli and beef," he said, shaking his head.

"And you don't even eat half of it," she replied, breaking her chopsticks apart and digging them into her dinner.

"What?" he looked at her, plastic fork suspended in the air.

"You don't eat the broccoli," she said and flipped the overhead light on, so she could see what she was doing.

"You my mother now?" he asked.

"Just an observation," she said and glanced back out the window, absently helping a heap of lo mein into her mouth. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Royce knock a piece of the offending vegetable off his fork and replace it with a chunk of beef.

Next week, they'd be partners a month.

She swallowed her noodles, which were greasy as hell, then crunched a snap pea.

Life on the job had been an adjustment, but she'd realized recently that she'd slipped into a routine of sorts. The thrill of clipping her belt and all its accessories around her waist every day had worn off, and she no longer went on patrol with the nagging fear that she'd be caught in a dark alley and blown to kibble by a weapon about the size of a bazooka.

It wasn't to say that she'd abandoned all caution—the first time she'd felt a gun hidden in a kid's waistband, her blood had run like ice the rest of the night—but she felt more at home in uniform, and in this car that smelled of plastics and less than stellar hygiene, than she previously would've thought possible.

But comfort came with its share of impatience, and increasingly she was leaving the precinct with an aching sort of frustration gnawing at her stomach and her heart. She didn't have access to archives, and her fantasies of being able to simply hop onto a computer and pull her mother's file had been dashed with the realization that there were no such computers on her level in the precinct. She had no authority to get the file, and no grounds or ability to investigate. The official file she'd requested long ago was useless, and she didn't believe obtaining another would be anymore helpful. More to the point, she wasn't sure she wanted anyone to know the reason she'd been drawn to law enforcement was lying in a shelf somewhere under One Police Plaza.

Suddenly feeling subdued, she picked half-heartedly at what remained of her noodles.

She had yet to come up with a plan to get into archives, and none seemed forth-coming. She wasn't even entirely sure what she'd do after she got there, but she was beginning to subscribe to the opinion that one should cross bridges as they came to them.

"Yeah, mine's kinda shitty too."

She snapped back to reality. "What?" she asked automatically, trying to rewind Royce's words.

"The food," he said. "Anyway, we should get rolling. Sixty-three's probably about up."

"Oh," she murmured, leaning back in her seat, fingers still wrapped around the little wooden sticks. "Yeah, alright." Clearing her throat, she focused her attention out the window again, at the cycling colors and their signs.

Royce seemed to pause for a beat before he turned the ignition key, but he said nothing as the engine roared to life and they slowly rolled back onto the Midtown side-street.

* * *

><p>"My mother died when I was twenty-two," Beckett said after a lengthy silence, staring heavily at her newly refilled glass. "My junior year at NYU." Her face felt hot, but whether it was the admission or the alcohol, she didn't know. She pressed on, "You know, back then, I wasn't aiming to be a cop. Wasn't even sure what I was aiming for, but cop never occurred to me." She couldn't seem to look away from the reflection of an overhead light in the liquor, and she snorted softly at a memory. "Mom, you know, she wanted me to be a lawyer." She picked up the glass, swirling its contents around and around; the ice had melted off. "She never said it, but I knew that's what she wanted."<p>

She downed it all in one gulp, not feeling it. Her lips felt numb.

"To tell the truth, law bored me to death." She fingered the glass. "And mom didn't talk about work much, but when she did, and sometimes when I saw those guys on TV, I just..." Her fingers slipped from glass to the little bowl, and she extracted a peanut. The shell felt hard and brittle as she compressed it between her fingers. "I didn't understand how she could listen to their stories all day. I don't know how she could believe them." She leaned on the bar, one elbow up so she could look at the shell as she turned it between her fingers. "Guess it figures now that's all I ever listen to. Bunch of stories, told by people who don't want us to think about them too much."

She could see Flannigan behind the peanut, and he was watching her as he flipped a coin slowly between his fingers. The metal caught the light as he turned it, over and over.

The peanut cracked with a soft _crunch_, and she raised another arm to flip the broken shell apart and get at what it protected. Clearing her throat, she slipped the nuts between her teeth and chewed slowly, staring off somewhere.

She was silent a long time, staring off at that little speck of nothing. Finally she said, "I come from a small family. Never knew my dad's half—and he never really talked about them. My grandmother died when I was a little girl, and my grandfather lived just long enough to see me graduate from high school." She cleared her throat again, reaching back into the little bowl. "There wasn't much to tear apart when mom died, just dad and me, but it did."

Swallowing, she broke apart the new shell, and she dropped the pieces to the floor. "I didn't want Royce or anyone else to know that. It felt like..." her voice trailed off as she chewed the peanuts, tasting the salt on the back of her teeth, "I dunno, I was holding back something very heavy with a really thin thread. I felt like if I let it go, it would just fall and fall, forever, and I'd never get it back, that piece of me."

She had a new peanut, and she rolled it between her hands as Flannigan continued flipping his coin, eyes on her. Exhaling, she dropped the shell onto the table and broke it with the side of her hand.

Picking through the wreckage, she found one of the nuts was smashed, its little brown wrapping sticking to a piece of the crushed shell. The other was still intact, and she stared at it as she picked it up. "Maybe that's why I was so vulnerable," she said after a beat. "Maybe that's why..." her eyes flicking to the bartender, then quickly back down at the nut. "why Royce started to see through me."  
>She could see the light bounce off the coin as she brushed the shell to the floor.<p>

* * *

><p>"Fold."<p>

The cards hit the table with a soft _thwak!_, punctuated by a hand slapping on top of them.

"Shit cards, Trevino."

"It's Pass the Shit for a reason."

Two people snorted. One gestured for another beer.

Beckett leaned back, staring at her hand. Three fours, two nines, and discards. Much, much better than the crap she'd been dealt most of the previous games.

Restraining an exhale, she tossed her two junk cards onto the table, then made her stack and turned her first card over, revealing one of the nines. She hadn't done a lot of bluffing tonight, and she figured there was a possibility that between that and the beer her fellow cops had been consuming since their arrival at end of shift, she'd have a shot.

She finished off her own bottle, ignoring the now lukewarm water she'd brought with her from the car. Flannigan, already setting down a beer for Yates, replaced hers at her nod.

"So, we're sitting there outside the bar, right?" Murray continued his story, which still seemed to be entertaining him despite the three times he'd been interrupted. "And, I swear to god, the _same guy_ we'd just fined for a D and D yesterday was taking a piss on the tree in front of our car."

"Raise," Beckett cut in, tossing a whole peanut—their equivalent to chips—onto the pile.

Royce, on her right, paused for a beat before adding his own peanut. "Call," he said.

"So I said to Ramirez, you know, 'You've gotta be kidding me,' " Murray reached into his pile of peanuts, which was considerably smaller than it had been two rounds ago. "Raise," he said, and he tossed two whole peanuts down, then continued, "And so we both got out of the car, and we both went up to him, and—you tell the rest, Ramirez."

"I don't want to tell the rest," Ramirez said, taking a swig of his beer. "I fold."

Everyone had gone, and Beckett flipped her next card to show one of her fours.

Trevino, after a moment's pause, said, "Pass."

"Anyway," Murray continued, "So we got out of the car, and the guy doesn't notice us, and he just keeps right on pissing, right? Like we weren't standing right there—"

"Bet another peanut," Beckett said, and she tossed it on the pile.

Murray resumed before Royce could name his play, "So we call out to him, and then he looks over, and I guess just then he notices the black and white two feet away from him and his manhood, and then he just peels off..."

Royce silently added two peanuts to the pile. He was eying Murray with an unreadable expression as he raised his bottle and took a sip.

"...and we start chasing after him. Call."

Everyone flipped their cards. Beckett showed another four.

"So he goes running out to the street, almost gets hit by a taxi, I swear to god—"

"Fold."

"—And then _we_ almost get hit by another car chasing after him—"

Beckett fingered her diminishing supply of peanuts, then said, "Pass."

"—And I don't know what the hell the people on the street thought was going on. Mostly they just stood there and stared. But, then, you wouldn't believe what happened—"

"Raise," Royce tossed a peanut down.

"—This crazy chick walking one of those dogs that look like a mop without the stick, she pulls out a fucking _taser—_"

"Your turn, Murray," Yates said.

"Oh." He paused for a beat, glanced around the table, then said, "Call." After tossing down a peanut, he went on, "And by the time we get across the street, she's hit him _twice_."

Beckett and Royce flipped their next card. Murray, after a pause, followed suit.

"Raise," Beckett said.

"Swear to god, the guy's so piss-ass wasted, he thinks her little walking puffball is one of _our_ dogs—"

"Fold," Royce said.

"—Starts begging me not to set the dog on him—"

"Your turn again," his partner said.

"I know." The change in tone was like a whipsaw. "I'm thinking. Just you and me now, right, Beckett?"

"What?" she started. Her attention had been drifting since the start of his tale, and she hadn't expected to be asked anything. "Oh. Yeah," she said.

Murray took a beat to look at her cards, then his own. He appeared to be working on a flush of diamonds.

"Call," he said finally, matching her bet.

They flipped their last cards.

"Shit," he muttered.

Suddenly feeling more attentive, Beckett smiled. "So what happened then?" she asked with as much genuine interest as she could muster, scooting the entire pile of peanuts toward her.

"What?" Murray seemed to be deflating. "Oh, we found a plug of heroin on him," he said. "Booked him."

There was a pause.

It seemed anticlimactic. Then again, it wasn't that interesting of a story to begin with.

Everyone else at the table seemed to be having similar thoughts.

"Alright," Ramirez said after a beat, rising. "Think that's enough for tonight. Beckett, how much I owe you?"

She looked down at her pile and started counting. Each nut was worth fifty cents, a whole shell a dollar. "Thirty-eight," she said eventually.

He nodded. As the first dealer, he held their money, and he slowly disbursed it all back. Trevino had won twenty-one, but almost everyone else had lost about ten. Beckett made eighteen.

Murray, now quieter, finished off the last of his beer and took back his money.

"Good game," Ramirez said. He'd only lost one or two bucks. "Thanks for coming, Beckett. We'd been one-down awhile."

She looked up as she tucked her winnings into her wallet. "Welcome," she said.

He grinned, "Next time, I'd say maybe we oughtta play strip-poker, but I've gotta feeling you'd be the only one left fully clothed." He paused as she smiled, heat coloring her cheeks, "And that's just a damn shame." Turning to his partner, who had gotten up but was munching peanuts, he said, "Come on, Murray. EBT tomorrow."

"Not if you don't shoot me first," he replied darkly, looking down at his empty beer bottle. Sighing, he followed Ramirez to the door, tossing a wave over his shoulder as he went.

Yates and Trevino, already on their feet, began making their own goodbyes, and they both shook hands with Beckett again. They left as Royce rose, jacket in hand.

"Come on, kid," he said, shrugging it on. "We can share a cab."

Beckett looked up at him and felt something inside her shift. "Thanks," she said, "but, uh, I'm gonna stay here a little longer."

She got up, reaching for both her bottles and her coat in preparation to move to the bar. She avoided his eyes.

He stood there as she took her seat and draped her coat over the back of the stool, and set her drinks down. She kept her eyes trained on the bottles on the shelf. Flannigan had gone around back.

Finally, he took a seat beside her. "Thought the boys might cheer you up," he said.

"What?" she asked, looking over at him.

He didn't say anything for a few beats. Then, "You know, it's hard for all of us, call like that. It's okay to be..." his voice trailed off as he thought. "Upset."

Her gut twisted itself into a knot, but she kept eye contact. "I'm fine," she lied.

"Alright."

She looked down at her bottle, then took a long, shallow sip, not really drinking so much as nursing.

"Beckett," Royce said, and he paused again, waiting for her to look at him.

She obliged, setting the bottle back down.

"I know I'm not the easiest guy to work with, but if you've gotta problem," he seemed to be choosing his words carefully, "you know, especially after something like that, it's okay to, uh...tell me." When she didn't say anything, he went on, "We'll see worse, and I need to know that you can handle yourself."

"Worried that I'll crack?" She took another drink, this one more deep.

"Should I be?"

She didn't reply, and he didn't say anything more.

A feeling of sickness wormed its way through her guts, and as she stared off at nothing, she flashed back.

They'd taken a disturbance call from dispatch, and had arrived to find a woman in a thick robe standing outside her apartment door. She'd heard odd noises on the fire escape, and suspected a burglar.

Beckett remembered very clearly that her robe had been a light, robin's egg blue, and the material looked like the polyester fibers that made up one of her throws at home. And she remembered as they knocked on the neighbor's door, and found it open, that it seemed odd this woman would go back to her apartment, and to bed, while she would still be up, in uniform, and would return to the streets.

"How many times have you gotten calls like that?" she asked suddenly, clutching her empty bottle. More than anything, she wanted another, or something stronger.

"Not often," Royce replied. He gestured to Flannigan, who had come out from the back room. "Sixteenth usually takes them."

"But often enough?" she pressed.

He paused, "Yeah."

Royce had shared a meaningful look with her, and he told the woman in the robin's egg blue robe to go back into her apartment. And then, for only the third time since the Academy, she drew her nine millimeter.

Her partner had opened the door, and she remembered only vaguely hearing him call out as her eyes adjusted to the light.

It was dark, and a lamp was out on the floor next to an overturned end table. A glass coffee table had been shattered, and she saw streetlight from outside glitter off the shards that littered the ground. A mug had spilled its contents on the carpet, and she saw dark stains just to the right.

"Bedroom," Royce breathed, and she followed him. Her gun felt hard and reassuring, and she felt sick at what they might find.

"You want another?"

She blinked, looking up to see Flannigan, who had given Royce another beer.

A desperate urge to say yes gripped her, but she shook her head. "I'll switch to water."

He nodded as she grabbed her old bottle from dinner, and she twisted it open, feeling like that had been a few centuries ago.

It tasted gross and unsatisfying, but she drank it anyway. She drank and she drank and she drank.

The door to the bedroom was sheltered by a partial wall that separated the kitchen from the rest of the room, and it seemed darker here than where they'd first walked in. Royce gestured for her to open the door as they stood in position, and she did, and he walked in first, gun upraised. She followed, and there seemed to be a moment that lasted forever as her eyes adjusted, and then that moment hadn't lasted long enough, and Royce was yelling something into his radio, and the universe seemed to spin in a million directions as she stared at the shadow on the bed.

The water bottle hit the bar again with a dull thud, and she screwed the cap back on. Royce was already halfway through his beer.

"Is there a way to know what happened to her?" she asked the plastic bottle. She paused and clarified, "Who did that to her?"

She could see Royce look at her, and she met his eyes again. "I'll call the Sixteenth tomorrow."

"Thanks," she said, and that seemed like the wrong thing to say, but she wasn't sure what would be any better.

She stared at the little mountain on the bottle.

And she was back in that room, and she blinked as the lights came on, temporarily blinding her. She saw the white sheets and the little dots of blood materialize from the blaze of color, and she saw the broken lamp on the floor, cord severed at the base.

Fear electrified the room, choked the air.

She couldn't breathe as she met her eyes, gun frozen where she'd pointed it. Hazel green, so like her own.

Royce was already at the bed, but she was rooted to the spot.

She couldn't be over twenty-five. No older than her.

She could hear her voice, broken as she sobbed...

"Come on, kid."

She snapped back to reality.

Royce was standing, and he lightly tapped her shoulder. "Come on, we'll share a cab back."

She wanted to stay, down a shot of scotch. Ten shots of scotch. Anything to erase those terrified hazel eyes. Anything to loosen the knot in her aching stomach.

But instead she got up. Slowly, she removed her coat from the stool, and she slipped into it. She felt the weight of her badge in an interior pocket as it pressed against her chest, and her gun was hard and reassuring against her hip—the only part of her belt she carried off duty.

"I usually take the bus," she heard herself say as they walked to the door.

Royce smiled, "Yeah, well, tonight you can afford a cab."

She didn't have the strength to argue as she followed him out into to the cool March night.

* * *

><p>There are double rainbow kits in it for anyone who caught the reference (and another for whoever knows which cast member talked about double rainbows). Please drop a comment in review if you did.<p>

Even if you didn't, I'd still like to see something from you, so go ahead and click the button.


	3. Chapter Three

Sorry for the long delay, for anyone who's following. Moving's a bitch, adjusting even more so.

* * *

><p>Hill of Our Home<p>

Chapter Three

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><p>"I think that was the moment what I was doing became real to me," Beckett said into her glass. Once again, it had been refilled. "On the news, you see pictures of people who've been murdered, every other channel has a different cop show with dead bodies and rape victims, but it's different, you know, when you're there." She turned a peanut vertically and set it up against the bar, as if it was listening to her. "I can't even describe it; it's like entering an alternate universe where all the light just sort of got sucked out of it."<p>

She dropped the peanut.

"I still hadn't seen a dead body at that point, but the woman we found was almost so much worse." She wet her lips, staring very intently at the peanut. Just beyond it, she saw Flannigan adjust on the stool he'd dragged behind the bar. "She was twenty-three. Really pretty. Had this long, black hair." Once again, she grabbed the peanut. "That night, someone broke into her apartment. His name was, uh..." she thought, tapping the nut lightly against the table. "Gault. Mark Gault.

"Gault, he was posing as a cop. One of us. And she let him in." Her nails sliced through the shell. "And he forced her to her bed, and he tied her up with the cord from her lamp, and he raped her."

There was a long, ringing sort of silence, and she stared at the seat she'd occupied a decade ago.

"We must've gotten there just a few minutes too late," she continued. "She was still on the bed." And, just as clearly as if she was standing there, she saw Royce as he helped her up, and she watched as he cut the cord with his knife. She could almost feel her fingers, tight on her gun, as she stood there, paralyzed. "We stayed with her until the detectives from the Sixteenth arrived," she said, "and then we went right back out on patrol." She smiled bitterly at the punctures in the shell. "Caught a couple kids vandalizing a meter."

She fingered the rim of her glass, wanting to lift it, but didn't. "I didn't sleep that night, or the next night either. I just laid there, thinking about my mom, thinking about that woman—Alicia Mathison was her name. I couldn't seem to escape the injustice of it all, and I was struck by how little I could do about it."

She swallowed, eyebrows creasing. "I got obsessed. I kept up with the Mathison case through the Sixteenth, went to her trial after Gault was caught—and that was years later. I couldn't help her, and I couldn't seem to help my mom either." She ran her tongue against her teeth. "For a couple weeks, I didn't really sleep. I kept telling myself one day I'd be able to reopen my mom's case, and I'd catch the guy, and he'd get the needle or get hit by a bus on his way to the courtroom, but the more I told myself, the more I didn't believe it. It'd been two years, you know, with _nothing_. Not a word. I didn't know if I'd ever make detective, was starting to think that even if I did, when I reopened her case there'd be nothing there to find. That I'd just be chasing empty leads forever. And the more I thought that, the more I started to believe it."

She paused, then smiled grimly at her peanut, and at the little sickle marks her nails had made in it. "And then I did something stupid." She looked up at Flannigan. "I went down to One PP."

* * *

><p>She half-expected a floodlight to pop on, exposing her to a SWAT team with assault rifles trained on her chest. She imagined them cuffing her, stripping her of her badge and her gun, throwing her out of One PP and the police department. She saw herself clearing off her desk and taking back her little mug from Canal Street, watching as Royce and the rest of the precinct went on with their day without her.<p>

But nothing happened, and she was still just standing there, one palm pressed to the side of the door.

Pulling herself together, she unclipped her flashlight from her belt and shined it into the darkness as she stepped into archives.

It was cool down here, but in the heavy sort of way that came from being underground, not air conditioned, and it smelled like old paper. As she walked down the first aisle, sweeping her beam over years and names, she was reminded, oddly, of a used bookstore and the musty, almost sweet smell of old books that hadn't been touched for years.

She came to the end of the aisle. These were all records from the 70s.

Exhaling, she skipped a couple rows and went down the next.

Today was her day off after a late shift the night before. Royce had taken her back to Flannigan's last night, and she hadn't managed to fall asleep until almost five in the morning. When she'd woken at eleven, she'd wanted nothing more than to stay in bed, crack open the novel on her end table, and have a couple cups of coffee to combat the ache behind her eyes.

But, instead, she'd slipped into her uniform, clipped on her heavy utility belt, gun, knife, and taser, and she'd left for One PP to gamble on a lie. When she'd arrived, the building had been buzzing with employees and officers returning from lunch, and the sergeant behind the desk had hardly glanced at her badge before allowing her down to archives.

She'd told him she was here to pick something up for Royce.

Here. Late 90s.

She cut her pace in half, a half-desperate sort of fear roaring through her gut and up her chest as she came to 1999.

And there it was, Bai – Bon.

Her heart pulled painfully, and she stared at the box, feeling almost sick. Then, with no small amount of trepidation, she slipped it from the metal shelving, flashlight gripped between her teeth, and sank to the floor where she stood.

The lid of the box hit the floor with a hollow _thwak_, and then she found the file, with her mother's name written in neat script along the top tab, and she felt the box slide from her lap to concrete as she stared half-blindly at the manilla envelope.

She was here; she'd done it.

She didn't know what the hell she was going to do, but she was _here._

And then she opened the file.

Her blood drained from her face.

She was looking at the top sheet of a pathology report, which was part of a larger packet of information held together by a paperclip. It seemed to her that the report was most of what the file contained, and a bit of flipping confirmed that. Most of what she saw seemed to be paperwork from the initial response, CSU reports, even the statement she and her father had given to the detective.

She wasn't sure what she had been expecting. A journal chronicling the detective's moves? His theories as he'd doggedly tracked leads to impregnable walls of solid concrete? Mug shots of the man who'd just slipped away, that last shred of incriminating evidence just out of reach?

Whatever it was, it wasn't what she was seeing.

Exhaling through the flashlight, she laid the file in her lap, then extracted the ME report, slowly working the paperclip free. Something came loose when she pulled it off, and several large pictures fell from the thin stack of paper and onto her lap.

The flashlight slid from her mouth, and she swore as it cracked into her wrist, but the pain hardly registered as the images that had so briefly flashed through her sight burned into her eyes.

She sat in the dark for a beat, then retrieved the flashlight from the floor, picked up the pictures that had fallen to her lap, and looked at them.

Her mouth went paper dry.

She remembered. Just a week before these pictures were taken, her mother had been complaining about her greying roots. Gone were the days she could look into the mirror and run a brush through her hair without finding a new strand of silver. "Katie," she'd said, fingering her daughter's hair, which only two days before had been cropped short and dyed black, with little stripes of electric blue highlights—a New Year's decision aided by no small amount of vodka. "What is this?"

"Don't start," she'd replied shortly, brushing her mother's hand off her.

Her eyes stung, and she felt a band squeeze tight around her heart.

Her mother's hair was bunched haphazardly behind her in this picture, a mess over her head, and her face was frozen in an expression of neutrality—so different from her bulldog glare, or that almost impish sort of smile she wore when she thought she'd won something.

Beckett touched her mom's face, which was far too white, sucking in a strangled breath as she saw the bruising along her collarbone.

She'd seen her mother like this once before, that night when she'd insisted on seeing her. Through the glass partition, she'd watched as the ME rolled out the gurney covered by a blue sheet, and she'd watched him lift the sheet, and then she'd stared at her mother's face.

She was standing there with the detective, who she had come with alone, not telling her father where she was going. She'd held it together just long enough to ask him to leave, and then she'd crumpled against the wall, fingers running through her short, coarse hair as she cried.

Beckett slowly flipped the picture, then touched the next.

Viewing her mother from so far away had obscured the details, smoothed away the violence that had wrenched her from the world, but the ME photographs were cold and impersonal, sharp in their honesty. Here, Johanna Beckett wasn't her mother, wasn't anyone's husband; she was something less than human, an object on a table.

Swallowing, she flipped the page again, and her stomach lurched as her eyes lit on a stab wound and a ruler lying along its length.

It was clean and bloodless, bruised the purples and reds of death. It hardly even looked like a knife thrust, like anything at all without the blood, and she traced the line, feeling the paper glide under her nail as she stared at it.

Slowly, she crept through the pages, skipping some, staring long and hard at others. Hours seemed to pass, and then she found a new set of pictures, and the world froze over even as the temperature in the room went up several hundred degrees.

"Oh, Mom," she whispered, stomach dropping out.

Her mother had died in work attire, in that plaid skirt she seemed to wear every other Tuesday, even though this had been a Saturday, and her beige trench was crumpled under her. Blood had soaked her blouse, turning the blue a deep, angry crimson. She was slumped against a pipe, hands stained red like she'd attempted to staunch the flow.

Beckett ripped violently at her collar. It was at least ten thousand degrees in here, and she couldn't breathe. Christ, she couldn't breathe.

The buttons finally came loose.

Christ, it was hot.

She stared down at her mother's face, drawing strangled, shallow breaths.

She still had her jewelry.

She wanted so desperately to flip the page, to shut the file, to return the box and escape from the basement, but she didn't move, her resolve hardening even as her stomach churned. Her mother had died alone in that alley, fingers soaked with her blood, but she sure as hell wasn't going to stay down here forever, amongst stacks of cold cases and homicides, while whoever had done it to her was still walking free somewhere.

Unable to bear looking at the photographs anymore, she flipped to the police reports and began to read, starting at page one.

Not that there was much.

The lead detective in the case—indeed, the _only_ detective in the case—was John Raglan. He had interview notes from both Beckett and her father, but he'd only written a few words down from a couple of her mother's colleagues, and his ultimate conclusion was that her mother had been killed in a random act of gang violence.

Beckett didn't know what case files usually contained, but even to her, an untrained a patrol cop, the investigative portion of the file seemed light.

A new feeling seemed to be eclipsing the grief knotting and twisting her insides: anger.

She directed her flashlight over the banker's box, and she dug out a couple files at random.

James Benny, or what was left of him, had been found in Central Park, a couple shots from a .45 having removed half his face. Beckett skipped the pathology report, instead going to the police reports.

Det. Glover had included copies of his notes and stapled them to the back of the reports. Benny had had four kids and was working as an intern at Bellevue at the time of his death, and Glover had apparently interviewed half the hospital staff, the family, and scattered acquaintances a few times each before the case had finally gone cold and ended up down here.

She looked at another file.

Patricia Bailey had been robbed of several tens of thousands worth of diamonds, one of which turned up a few months later at a pawn shop on Forty-Seventh and Fifth.

Not what she was looking for.

She switched files again.

Pat Barker had also been robbed.

George Bishop was carjacked by a ring of car thieves. Two of the thieves were caught, but the car was scrap metal by the time they got to it.

John Gillnitz was found dead in his office of a suspected heart attack.

Interest caught, Beckett looked further.

An autopsy revealed high levels of strychnine in his system, which he'd apparently ingested with coffee and half a bagel shortly before his death.

Det. Pruett had also included copies of his notes, and had spent a long time investigating the victim's wife for evidence of foul play. He had interview notes with half the office staff, the victim's siblings, neighbors, and friends. About two weeks after Gillnitz's collapse, Pruett finally arrested not the wife, but the victim's mistress, who had apparently come to visit him in his office and left after dropping a couple tablets of the poison in with his coffee.

Beckett dug for another file.

Robbery. Rape. Robbery.

Homicide.

She extracted the file.

Vivian Bonneli had died from blunt force trauma to the head in her apartment in Little Italy. A friend found her three days later. Det. Dusak was the investigating officer.

Unlike Glover and Pruett, Dusak had not included his notes in the file, but copies of warrants issued, a few interview tapes, and the killer's rap sheet were present.

Beckett closed the file, glancing down at her mother's case, which was still lying open on her lap.

She had only been interviewed once, that night, right after she'd left that little viewing room in the morgue. As a person who wasn't of interest, she'd never thought this odd. But Raglan hadn't appeared to have even interviewed her father more than once—and one didn't need to be a homicide detective to know that spouses are always primary suspects.

Beckett flipped back the pages until she was at the CSU photos again, and she held the picture of her mother in the alley up, shining her flashlight on it.

And what had she been doing in an alley in the Lower West Side? Her parents had lived uptown, and she was supposed to be meeting them on her way back from her office in Midtown. It wouldn't be like her mom to head into an alley anyway, let alone one so out of the way.

She stared at the photo, willing it to give her an answer.

Maybe—

"What the hell are you doing down here?"

She jumped, and her flashlight bounced away across the concrete as she scrambled to her feet. The lights flicked on, and her vision went white.

"What?" she said automatically, blinking as the shapes of the shelves and the man looking at her came into view.

He was black, tall, wearing a suit. And he was regarding her with an expression that made her sweat.

"I said, what the hell are you doing down here?" his eyes bored into her before taking in the banker's box and her mother's file, which was now scattered all over the floor. Beckett was still gripping the photograph.

"I, sir—" her thoughts raced for an answer, an explanation, anything, but she had nothing. Her face felt hot. "Sir, this is...my mother," she said weakly.

He glanced down again, and her eyes followed his. The ME and CSU photographs were spread around where she stood. Her mother's face, her bloody clothes, the knife wounds. Everywhere she looked, there she was.

"Sir, there are—" she started to say, and he looked back up at her, expression unreadable. "I found..." her voice trailed off, "things."

"Things?" he repeated, eyebrows arching.

She swallowed. Her mouth was dry as hell. "Things that don't make sense. That weren't investigated."

He seemed to stare at her for an eon. "Who are you?" he asked finally.

"Beckett—Kate Beckett."

"You're an officer?"

"Yes, sir, with the Seventeenth."

"Badge number?"

"Four one three one nine," she rattled off the numbers. Her heart was beating so hard she was sure he could hear it.

He seemed to be taking in her uniform. "You're a patrol officer?"

"Yes, sir."

"Badge?"

"Badge?" she repeated, temporarily forgetting what that was. Then reality slammed into her, and she hurriedly yanked it from a pocket and walked over to show it to him.

He took it, studied it, then eventually handed it back to her, glancing at the picture she was still gripping in one hand.

"You're not allowed to be down here," he said.

"I know," she averted her gaze and shifted the photograph closer to her chest. She wanted so desperately to explain, to tell him what she may've found. For one wild moment, she saw herself reopening the case as the lead investigator, chewing Raglan out, hauling in some tattooed guy with a knife and extracting his confession.

But she said nothing.

"Put it back and go," he said, and her heart tightened.

"Yes, sir," she replied quietly.

"Don't let me catch you down here again."

"Yes, sir," she said again.

He paused, and she waited as he glanced around the pictures on the floor. She did too, thinking miserably about having to leave her mother here with Patricia Bailey and John Gillnitz. She didn't know what she'd accomplished, coming down here.

Reflexively, she squeezed the picture against her chest.

"I'm sorry."

She looked up, eyes stinging. The man in the suit, whoever he was, was regarding her with a softened expression.

"For what?" she asked haltingly.

"For your mother."

Her gut lurched, and she couldn't seem to say anything.

He turned, and then he was walking away. "Remember, Beckett," he said as he made his way to the end of the aisle. "Don't come back here. I don't want to have to write you up."

She stood there, rigid, heart thumping hard in her throat as she watched him turn the corner and disappear from sight.

And then she was alone again.


End file.
